RIAA defendant dies, heirs given 60 days to grieve before depositions

RIAA to dead guy's kids: "This is the world's smallest violin... and we own …

In the case of Warner et al v. Scantlebury, yet another individual was targeted by seven record labels looking for restitution of the horrible damages inflicted by the alleged downloading of music files. Most of the case documents are not publicly available at this point, and the suit was not highly publicised until now, so it's hard to find any real detail on the charges involved.

Larry Scantlebury had the temerity to die before the case was resolved, though. Again, the cause of death is unknown, but the RIAA did get a hold of a death certificate. It was filed as support for a motion to "stay the case for 60 days and extend all deadlines 60 days," filed by the record labels' lawyers. The reason for the stay request is this:

"Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury?s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve."

How quaintly civil of them. Because the litigants believed that the case was nearing a resolution before Larry's passing, it wants to move on with the proceedings rather than drop the case, and will request depositions from his heirs after the 60-day grieving period. Considering that deceased Enron executive Ken Lay's assets may be safe from legal action after his death, the recording industry's tenacity in this case is astounding.

We don't know much about Larry Scantlebury, except that he was an avid reader and a Top 1,000 reviewer on Amazon, mostly of books. We do know, however, that the RIAA continues to commit public relations blunders, and seems willing to sacrifice the credibility of an entire industry in echange for a couple of thousand dollars in settlement fees. None of this is likely to reduce piracy by any measurable amount, and the publicity might have the opposite effect as people read about these cases and then go on to see what this downloading business is all about. The legal scare tactics will have to stop at some point. A 60-day reprieve won't quite suffice.